Literary agents endlessly seek original voices, those rare writers who can capture life through an idiosyncratic tone. Some projects stand apart from the crowd with the musicality of the language and the freshness of their perspective.
You could argue that most acclaimed authors are distinctive. Even pulp fiction has its quirks. But a few times a year, a book is released that feels like encountering something all its own. Finding them as a reader is the proverbial breath of fresh air.
Here are four novels and a story collection that made me sit up and take notice.
1.
“I’m not a bad guy. I know how that sounds – defensive, unscrupulous – but it’s true. I’m like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good.”
The opening lines of the first story of this collection are riveting. We get a sense of this man, Yunior, and his internal conflict. And then he goes deeper:
“Magdalena disagrees though. She considers me a typical Domenican man: a sucio, an asshole.”
Another few lines and we have the central conflict: not everyone agrees with the Yunior’s self-assessment. His battle against his own nature is at the heart of this story collection.
To read Junot Diaz is to be held captive by this unique voice, a window into Dominican-American machismo.
2.
“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”
One fiction fundamental is that your opening should hint at all that is to come. Plath is a master at foreshadowing. Just look at all she does in her first line: “sultry” evokes the mood and setting, the last line contains the narrator’s dislocation, and the Rosenberg reference connotes the electric shock treatments the narrator will go through.
But what else can you expect from a poet who coined the term granite canyons to describe the city?
3.
This is an unsung gem, the story of a naive young woman’s summer internship in New York. It starts by introducing her birth mother, who is anticipating their first meeting:
“Lulu is enjoying a soak in the bathtub of her room in the Konig von Ungarn in Vienna. She’s put in a double helping of the bubble stuff that came gratis in a stoppered glass bottle – none of those cheesy foil packets for this hotel!- and had fashioned herself a bubble helmet and enormous foamy breasts.”
I love this description of a pampered woman and her child-like bath time. The story twists quickly: Lulu is with a rich boyfriend and is luxuriating in the bath because it’s a rare treat (perhaps hinted at by the gratis reference… an affluent character wouldn’t notice such things). She is anxious about Desert Ray, the baby she gave up twenty-one years ago. Now called Edith, she has moved to New York for the summer to intern for a literary magazine. The story of Edith’s summer, and her reunion with her mother, is a delightful read.
4.
“I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn, and so the next morning I traveled down there from Westchester to scope out the terrain. I hadn’t been back in fifty-six years and I remembered nothing.”
Paul Auster starts this excellent novel with the distinct voice of Nathan, a depressed divorcee looking for a way out. He is a life insurance salesman estranged from his adult daughter. As a favor to her, he finds his nephew Tom and begins the slow process of reconnecting to life. This is a vivid depiction of a man and his neighborhood and the small things that make life worth living. No writer does it quite the same way.
5.
“I do not love mankind.
People think they’re interesting. That’s the first mistake. Every retiree you meet wants to supply you with a life story.
An example: thirty-five years ago a woman came into the library. She’d just heard about oral histories, and wanted to string one together herself.
‘We have so many wonderful old people around(she said…) my father, for instance, is in a nursing home’
Her father. Of course. She was not interested in the past, but her past.”
The distinct voice of Peggy Cort, a cranky librarian in 1950s Cape Cod, jumps to life from the page. She has all but given up on life when she meets James Carlson Sweatt, a giant who captures her heart.
The plot – think Harold and Maude – is not terribly original, but the voice certainly is.
Books Smitten 